As the final part of this interview series with SaaSholic venture capitalist founder Gustavo Souza, we touched upon people he looks up to. Who? Peter Livingston. And we talked about why. I/ But first, who is Peter Livingston? Peter Livingston began as a full-time employee in a tech company. The company did perform very well and IPOed. He hit the jackpot and…
About two years ago, before the pandemic broke out, I spoke to Alexandre Scialom, a business angel friend of mine based in Silicon Valley who is working on building up his own fund, Fresh Ventures. Alex told me that any Business Angel hoping to invest in Y Combinator startups must sign a million-dollar checks to get a seat at the board. That’s a lot…
Gustavo and I recently talked about what venture capitalists do. In this article we look at each activity and try to and position it on a “most important/hardest matrix”. The most important and hardest matrix The X axis defines the most important activities venture capitalist have to do. In the previous post, Gustavo and I discussed the main generic activities that investors do and…
In the innovation ecosystem, venture capitalist stand apart. A source of money and ideas, entrepreneurs seek their advice and capital while industry leaders glean their insight on disruptions in the market. So clearly, venture capitalists are coveted. But what do they do? I cover this topic with Managing Director of venture capital firm SaaSholic, Gustavo Souza. I/ A Very Brief Introduction of Gustavo…
Succeeding at innovation is tough business Marketing strategists, Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman and David Farber show that most innovative product launches fail. More than half of newly launched products don’t meet their company’s expectations. Of every 100 new products, only one covers its development costs. Of 300 new products, only one successfully meets the company’s growth target. The reason? The authors point to the…
In his book entitled Principles, asset manager and Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio, mentions that life can be overwhelming and full of unexpected events. Having a set of principles should help one keep one’s feet on the ground and move forward in life. Accepting that life can be messy and uncomfortable is part of the game and the author recommends that anyone be guided by rational…
In his book, The Failure of Risk Management, author Douglas Hubbard talks about starts out with defining risk management explaining why most risk assessment methods don’t work before developing a functional risk management approach. Defining risk To define risk management, the author begins with defining risk itself. It involves assessing the probabilities of various outcomes and, for each outcome measuring the magnitude of the outcome…
In his book The Black Swan, the author, Nicholas Taleb, talks about how random events may come as a surprise to many of us. He begins by mentioning that human beings have a gift for transforming stimuli coming from their environment into meaningful information. Much of this has resulted in building the scientific method, mythologies about how our world was created, stories of heroes facing difficult…
Why does project risk matter? In his book, Identifying and Managing Project Risk, Tom Kendrick mentions that “reviewing the records of technical projects, it is striking how many consecutive projects fall victim to the same problems.” He adds that “risks tend to occur in project after project unless you understand the root causes and do something differently to avoid the problem.” Clearly, any project comes…
Why is VC blossoming? In his book, The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital, investor Andrew Roman talks about what entrepreneurs must understand about the venture capital industry if they want to raise money and how they should go about attracting venture capital. He begins by talking about the venture capital market in the 1990s where the costs of launching a new business were high: purchasing software licenses and…